Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

The long nineteenth century (1789-1914) has been described as an axial age in the history of both bees and literature. It was the period in which the ecological and agronomic values that are still attributed to bees by modern industrial society were first established, and it was the period in which one bee species (the European honeybee) completed its dispersal to every habitable continent on Earth. At the same time, literature – which would enable, represent and in some cases repress or disavow this radical transformation of bees’ fortunes ­– was undergoing its own set of transformations. Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century navigates the various developments that occurred in the scientific study of bees and in beekeeping during this period of remarkable change, focusing on the bees themselves, those with whom they lived, and how old and new ideas about bees found expression in an ever-diversifying range of literary media. Ranging across literary forms and genres, the studies in this volume show the ubiquity of bees in nineteenth-century culture, demonstrate the queer specificity of writing about and with bees, and foreground new avenues for research into an animal profoundly implicated in the political, economic, ecological, emotional and aesthetic conditions of the modern world.

Chapter 1. Introduction: honey, wax, pollination Alexis Harley, La Trobe University, Christopher Harrington, La Trobe University.- Chapter 2. “Science and the Sacred Honeybee in the Nineteenth Century” Diane M. Rodgers, Northern Illinois University.- Chapter 3. “Housewives and Old Wives: sex and superstition in English Beekeeping” Adam Ebert, Mount Mercy University.- Chapter 4. “Unsettling Homes”: Honeybees, Georgiana Molloy and Colonial Beekeeping in Australia Jessica White, University of Adelaide.- Chapter 5. “The Social Insect and the Fashionable Newspaper”: Bee Poetry in the Oracle and World Claire Knowles, La Trobe University.- Chapter 6. “A Nineteenth-Century Beeography: Lucy Peacock’s The Life of a Bee Related by Herself (1800)” Samantha George, University of Hertfordshire.- Chapter 7. “Keats’s Honeybees:  Sound, Passion, and Natural Prophecy” Hermione de Almeida, University of Tulsa.-Chapter 8. “Bumblebees and Emily Dickinson” Camilla Chen, Oxford University.- Chapter 9. A Hive Turned Upside Down: Drone Bees and the Chartist Imaginary Christopher Harrington, La Trobe University.- Chapter 10. “Through the Agency of Bees”: Charles Darwin, John Lubbock, and the Secret Lives of Plants and People” Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan.- Chapter 11. “Queens and Drones in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex” Alexis Harley, La Trobe University.- Chapter 12. “The Experimental Eminence of Darwin’s Bees” John Clark, St Andrews University.

Alexis Harley lectures in literary studies at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self. She has kept honeybees since 2012. 

Christopher Harrington teaches literary studies at Victoria University in Melbourne. He has published numerous articles on the representation of bees and insects in literature.